About Alison Arnett
Alison Arnett is a restaurant and food consultant, a freelance writer and editor. She has consulted some of Boston’s most prestigious restaurants - L’Espalier, Radius, Davio’s and others - on menus, service issues, marketing ideas and ambience. Her Whole Foods project - Company’s Coming - offered menus and recipes to grocery customers throughout 2008. She also developed and leads restaurant and food tours for Elderhostel’s Days of Discovery.
For 15 years, Arnett was the Boston Globe’s restaurant critic and chief food writer, honing a lifelong interest in cooking and restaurants into a focused career. She not only reviewed Boston’s restaurants in a period of expansive growth and creativity, but also reported and wrote about nutrition, agriculture, trends, fads, cookbooks and personalities in the food business.
Throughout this work, Arnett used her journalistic experience as an assistant managing editor for the Globe Sunday sections, and years editing local, national and international news at the Globe, The New York Times, and the Kansas City Star.
Her life in food began very early. The oldest of eight children who grew up in a village in Western Kansas, Arnett learned not only how to feed four brothers and three sisters, but how to take responsibility and guide others.
She is an avid cook, bakes bread several times a week, gardens enthusiastically, and is interested in knitting and other textile arts.